B movies since the 1980s

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B movies
Zombies as portrayed in the movie "Night of the Living Dead"

Cinematic exhibition of the

major Hollywood studios moved progressively into the production of A-grade films in genres that had long been low-budget territory. With the majors also adopting exploitation-derived methods of booking and marketing, B movies began to be squeezed out of the commercial arena. The advent of digital cinema
in the new millennium appeared to open up new opportunities for the distribution of inexpensive genre movies.

The B movie loses its place: 1980s

Most of the B-movie production houses founded during the

The Exorcist (1973) and, though not effects-driven, George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973) were the first serious steps in Hollywood's transformation into an industry built around high-budget B-themed movies. But the tidal shift in the majors' focus owed largely to the enormous success of three films: Steven Spielberg's creature feature Jaws (1975) and Lucas's space opera Star Wars (1977) had each, in turn, become the highest-grossing film in motion picture history. Superman, released in December 1978, had proved that a studio could spend $55 million on a movie about a children's comic book character and make a very handsome profit. Not an all-time record-breaker like Jaws and Star Wars, it was merely the biggest box-office hit of 1979.[1] Blockbuster fantasy spectacles like the original, 1933 King Kong had once been exceptional; in the new Hollywood, increasingly under the sway of multi-industrial conglomerates, they would rule.[2]

It had taken a decade and half, from 1961 to 1976, for the production cost of the average Hollywood feature to double from $2 million to $4 million—actually a decline if adjusted for inflation. In just four years it more than doubled again, hitting $8.5 million in 1980 (a constant-dollar increase of about 25 percent). Even as the U.S. inflation rate eased, the average expense of moviemaking would continue to soar.

Universal released a movie in the same tradition: fantasy plus muscles. The lead role was to be played by an Austrian-born actor with a great reputation as a bodybuilder but entirely unproven as a major film star. Adjusting for inflation, the cost of Atlas was about $400,000 in 1982 dollars. Production cost on Conan the Barbarian was an estimated $20 million.[7] Hercules had opened in 600 theaters, an astonishing figure at the time.[8] Conan opened in 1,395, making it one of more than twenty movies that year to open at over 900 theaters.[9]

Despite the mounting financial pressures, distribution obstacles, and overall risk, a substantial number of genre movies from small studios and independent filmmakers were still reaching theaters. In September 1980, Corman released his most expensive movie to date: Battle Beyond the Stars, with screenplay by John Sayles and art direction by James Cameron, cost his New World Pictures a grand total of $2 million. By comparison, the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, which came out three-and-a-half months before the Corman epic, was originally budgeted at $18.5 million and wound up costing $33 million, triple the cost of Star Wars just three years before.[10] Horror was the strongest low-budget genre of the time, particularly in the "slasher" mode as with The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), directed by Amy Holden-Jones and written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown. The film was produced for New World on a budget of $250,000.[11] At the beginning of 1983, Corman sold New World; New Horizons, later Concorde–New Horizons, became his primary company. In 1984, New Horizons released a critically applauded movie set amid the punk scene written and directed by Penelope Spheeris. Vincent Canby's admiring review ends with a definitive compliment: "Suburbia is a good genre film."[12]

Writer-director

John Waters movie with an estimated $300,000 budget and an old-school exploitation gimmick: Odorama. In October that year, a gore-filled yet stylish horror movie made for less than $400,000 was premiered at a theater in Detroit.[14] The writer, director, and co–executive producer of The Book of the Dead, Sam Raimi, was a week shy of his twenty-second birthday; star and co–executive producer Bruce Campbell was twenty-three. Retitled The Evil Dead, it was picked up for distribution by New Line in 1983 and became a critical and commercial hit. Comparing it to Night of the Living Dead, one reviewer said "it achieves a similarly claustrophobic intensity on a microscopic budget. It's a shoestring tour de force."[15]

One of the most successful B-movie companies of the 1980s was a survivor from the heyday of the exploitation era,

The Untouchables (1987).[16] Troma's best-known production is The Toxic Avenger (1985), whose hero, after plunging into a vat of toxic waste while attempting to escape a loathsome gang of tormentors, mutates into a hideous creature with enhanced physical strength and revenge on what's left of his mind. After the film's successful release, the character, affectionately known as Toxie, became the symbol of Troma and an icon of the 1980s B movie. One of the few successful B-studio startups of the decade was Rome-based Empire Pictures, whose first production, Ghoulies, reached theaters in 1985. Despite other profitable ventures such as Re-Animator (1985), financial difficulties forced the company's American founder to sell it off in 1988.[17]

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark adapted the midnight movie tradition for cable television
.

The growth of the cable television industry in the 1980s helped support the low-budget film market, as many B movies quickly wound up as "filler" material for 24-hour cable channels or were made expressly for that purpose. The broadcast version of the midnight movie remained popular: the nationally syndicated Movie Macabre package starring Cassandra Peterson—aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark—was essentially a brassier copy of The Vampira Show, presenting mostly low-budget horror films interspersed with Elvira's satiric commentary and abundant display of cleavage. The video rental market was also becoming central to B-film economics: Empire's financial model, for instance, relied on seeing a profit not from theatrical rentals, but only later, at the video store.[18] A number of Concorde–New Horizon releases appeared only briefly in theaters, or not at all.

B's in the arthouse: 1990s

By 1990, the cost of the average U.S. film had passed $25 million.[19] Of the nine films released that year to gross more than $100 million at the U.S. box office, two would have been strictly B-movie material before the late 1970s: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Dick Tracy. Three more—the science-fiction thriller Total Recall, the action-filled detective thriller Die Hard 2, and the year's biggest hit, the slapstick kiddie comedy Home Alone—were also far closer to the traditional arena of the B's than to classic A-list subject matter.[20] The growing popularity of home video and access to unedited movies on cable and satellite television along with real estate pressures were making survival more difficult for the sort of small- or non-chain theaters that were the primary home of independently produced genre films. Drive-in screens were rapidly disappearing from the American landscape: between 1987 and 1990, the number in operation fell from 2,507 to 910.[21] Surviving B-movie operations adapted in different ways. Releases from Troma now frequently went

Time Warner conglomerate. The following year, Showtime launched Roger Corman Presents, a series of thirteen straight-to-cable movies produced by Concorde–New Horizons. A New York Times reviewer found that the initial installment qualified as "vintage Corman...spiked with everything from bared female breasts to a mind-blowing quote from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice."[22]

At the same time as exhibition venues for B films vanished, the independent film movement was burgeoning; among the results were various crossovers between the low-budget genre movie and the "sophisticated" arthouse picture. Director

Body Snatchers (1993), a major-studio remake of the sci-fi classic and an acknowledgment of his debt to the B's of an earlier generation. Larry Fessenden's micro-budget monster movies, such as No Telling (1991) and Habit (1997), reframe classic genre subjects—Frankenstein and vampirism, respectively—to explore issues of contemporary relevance—animal experimentation, ecological destruction, drug addiction, and fin-de-siècle urban romance. Written and directed by Jeremy Horton, 100 Proof (1997) is based on the true story of a killing spree that occurred in Lexington, Kentucky, a decade earlier. Praising its authentic depiction of the impoverished milieu in which it is set, critics variously described its style as evoking a home movie or a reality-style TV police series.[24] Joe Leydon of Variety, capturing the way it crossed the line between genre and art film, called it a "diamond in the rough, or at least a shiny bit of jagged rhinestone."[25]

NC-17 rating (No one under 17 admitted) that it fully deserves. It includes frontal nudity, many sexual encounters and coolly grotesque situations linking sex and violence in graphic, sickening ways."[27] Financed, like King of New York, by a consortium of production companies, it was ultimately picked up for U.S. distribution by Fine Line Features
. In more ways than one, this result resonated perfectly with the way the film scrambled definitions: Fine Line was a subsidiary of New Line, recently merged into the Time Warner empire—specifically, it was the old exploitation distributor's arthouse division.

The B movie in the digital age: 2000s

By the turn of the millennium, the average production cost of an American feature had already spent three years above the $50 million mark.

another initiating a series, as well as a remake of a 1971 film), a child-targeted cartoon, a comic book adaptation, a sci-fi series installment, a sci-fi remake, and a King Kong remake.[28] It was a slow year for Corman: he produced just one movie, which had no American theatrical release, true of most of the pictures he had been involved in recently. Bloodfist 2050, directed by long-time B filmmaker and Corman collaborator Cirio H. Santiago, went straight to DVD in the United States.[29] Ultrawide openings at many thousands of theaters were becoming the norm. In May 2007 alone, three fantasy blockbusters—Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Spider-Man 3, and Shrek the Third—each opened on over 10,000 screens.[30] As big-budget Hollywood movies further usurped the genre territories that were traditionally the domain of the B's, the ongoing viability of the familiar brand of B movie was in grave doubt. Critic A. O. Scott
of the New York Times warned of the impending "extinction" of:

"the cheesy, campy, guilty pleasures that used to bubble up with some regularity out of the B-picture ooze of cut-rate genre entertainment. Those cherished bad movies—full of jerry-built effects, abominable acting, ludicrous story lines—once flickered with zesty crudity in drive-ins and grind houses across the land. B-picture genres—science fiction and comic-book fantasy in particular, but also kiddie cartoons and horror pictures—now dominate the A-list, commanding the largest budgets and the most attention from the market-research and quality-control departments of the companies that manufacture them.... [F]or the most part, the schlock of the past has evolved into star-driven, heavily publicized, expensive mediocrities....[31]"

On the other hand, recent industry trends suggest the reemergence of something that looks very like the traditional A-B split in major studio production, though with fewer "programmers" bridging the gap. According to a 2006 report by industry analyst Alfonso Marone, "The average budget for a Hollywood movie is currently around $60m, rising to $100m when the cost of marketing for domestic launch (USA only) is factored into the equation. However, we are now witnessing a polarisation of film budgets into two tiers: large productions ($120–150m) and niche features ($5–20m). The rationale is that the likelihood of success is maximised by coupling ultra-large budget and highly marketable features (e.g., Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest), with multiple low-cost bets (e.g., Little Miss Sunshine). Fewer $30–70m releases are expected."[32]

Little Miss Sunshine was produced by

1950s. Despite its low budgets and consequently low benchmarks for profitability, Fox Atomic's output was seen as unsuccessful by its parent company, which shut it down in 2009.[34]

In a development hinted at by the Variety quotation above, technological advances are greatly facilitating the production of truly low-budget motion pictures. Although there have always been economical means with which to shoot movies, including

postproduction methods allow even low-budget filmmakers to produce films with excellent (and not necessarily "grittier") image quality and precise editing effects—though technical excellence is no guarantee of aesthetic value or even cinematographic competence. As Marone observes, "the equipment budget (camera, support) required for shooting digital is approximately 1/10 that for film, significantly lowering the production budget for independent features." Comparing circumstances in 2006 to those just a couple of years earlier, he argues that the "quality of digital filmmaking has improved dramatically."[32]

Independent filmmakers, whether working in a genre or arthouse mode, continue to find it difficult to gain access to distribution channels, though so-called digital end-to-end methods of distribution offer new opportunities. The so-called day-and-date strategy, in a which a film is released simultaneously in theaters as well as DVD and/or cable, may offer a way for the true low-budget B movie to regain some of the audience it has lost.[35] In a similar fashion, the popularity of Internet sites such as YouTube have opened up entirely new avenues for the presentation of motion pictures made on a shoestring. Abel Ferrara, envisioning his first digital film, says, "I want to do it on the Internet...and put it out in 10-minute increments. I know that watching films on computer is the future—it's a direct connection to the audience."[36]

Many of these developments have come together to create a boom in a relatively new form of low-budget genre picture. The fan film, typically an unauthorized production set in the imaginary universe of a popular genre movie or TV series, may be thought of as the most widespread present incarnation of the B movie. "Arguably the first fan film was

Buffy the Vampire Slayer universes. A parallel development in fan culture has been inspired in part by the direct-to-video market, whose products garner little notice and less respect in mainstream culture. According to scholar Linda Ruth Williams, the "new B-movie culture runs on the convoluted equation that cheap means bad which means good. Such products garner far more respect from fans because they manage to press the same buttons on one million dollars (or less) rather than one hundred million (or more)."[38]

Since 2006,

Alone With Her, Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny or Shane Carruth's Primer—films most Americans will never see."[40]

References

  1. ^ Superman (1978) part of Box Office Mojo website. Retrieved 12/29/06.
  2. ^ See The eight majors in the post-system era for a record of the sales and mergers involving the eight major studios of the Golden Age.
  3. ^ Finler (2003), p. 42. Prince (2002) gives $9 million as the average production cost in 1980, and a total of $13 million after adding on costs for manufacturing exhibition prints and marketing (p. 20). See also p. 21, chart 1.2. The Box Office Mojo website gives $9.4 million as the 1980 production figure; see Movie Box Office Results by Year, 1980–Present. Retrieved 12/29/06.
  4. ^ Lubasch (1979).
  5. ^ Cook (2000), pp. 323–24.
  6. ^ Per Corman in Di Franco (1979), p. 101.
  7. ^ Business Data for Conan the Barbarian (1982) part of IMDb.com. Retrieved 1/8/07.
  8. ^ Cook (2000), p. 324.
  9. ^ 1982 Yearly Box Office Results part of Box Office Mojo website. Retrieved 12/29/06.
  10. ^ Mackey-Kallis (2001), pp. 204–5.
  11. ^ Collum (2004), pp. 11–14.
  12. ^ Canby (1984). Note that IMDb.com's entry on the film incorrectly states that it was released by New World. Note that in his Senses of Cinema entry on Corman, Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon makes the following error: "Aimed strictly at the home video and direct-to-cable market, Corman's Concorde films included such titles as Penelope Spheeris' Suburbia (1984)." Aside from the fact that the Concorde name did not appear on the film, it received a widely reviewed theatrical release.
  13. ^ Petit (1999), p. 1172.
  14. ^ Cost per Bruce Campbell, cited in Warren (2001), p. 45
  15. ^ David Chute (Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, May 27, 1983), quoted in Warren (2001), p. 94.
  16. ^ Harper (2004), pp. 156–57.
  17. ^ Morrow (1996), pp. 112–13; "Interview: Charles Band" interview by Robert Newton, October 3, 2005; part of Cinematical website. Retrieved 1/4/07.
  18. ^ Morrow (1996), p. 112.
  19. ^ a b Movie Box Office Results by Year, 1980–Present part of Box Office Mojo website. Retrieved 12/29/06.
  20. ^ 1990 Yearly Box Office Results part of Box Office Mojo website. Retrieved 12/29/06. Dick Tracy literally had been B-movie material—the character was featured in four low-budget RKO films in the mid- to late 1940s. For how espionage and crimebusting thrillers historically were "widely regarded as nothing more than B-movie fodder," see James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 46–50.
  21. ^ A Brief Overview part of the Drive on In website. Retrieved 1/2/06.
  22. ^ O'Connor (1995).
  23. ^ Johnstone (1999), p. 16; "Abel Ferrara, Bad Lieutenant" Archived 2007-08-15 at the Wayback Machine part of the Mondo Video website. Retrieved 1/1/07. Online claims that King of New York was budgeted at $8 million do not appear to be well founded. No reliable figure has been located to date.
  24. ^ Holden, Stephen (1997-09-24). "'100 Proof': Sullen Slice of Sullen Lives". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-02-26. Fox, Ken. "100 Proof: Review". TVGuide.com. Retrieved 2010-02-26.
  25. ^ Leydon, Joe (1997-03-02). "100 Proof". Variety. Retrieved 2010-02-26.
  26. ^ Corliss (1981).
  27. ^ Maslin (1997).
  28. ^ 2005 Yearly Box Office Results part of Box Office Mojo website. Retrieved 1/2/07.
  29. ^ See, e.g., "Made in the Philippines: Cirio H. Santiago Interviewed" Archived 2013-06-07 at the Wayback Machine interview by Erika Franklin, Firecracker webzine, April 2006.
  30. ^ Halbfinger (2007).
  31. ^ Scott (2005).
  32. ^ a b Marone, Alfonso (2006). "One More Ride on the Hollywood Roller-coaster" (PDF). Spectrum Strategy Consultants. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 February 2007. Retrieved 2006-12-29.
  33. ^ Zeitchik and Laporte (2006).
  34. ^ Fleming, Michael (2009-04-19). "Fox Folding Atomic Label". Variety. Retrieved 2010-04-27.
  35. ^ For a discussion of how day-and-date is being used for independent and foreign arthouse films, see Dargis (2007), p. 19.
  36. ^ Nelson (2007), p. 66.
  37. ^ a b Holman (2007), p. 12.
  38. ^ Williams (2005), p. 288.
  39. ^ Potts, Rolf (2007-10-07). "The New B Movie". New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2010-05-22.
  40. ^ Strange (2007), p. 17.

Sources

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